Abstract
The penultimate part of the Riḥla by Ibn Baṭṭūṭa recounts his return journey to Morocco from the Middle East through North Africa—and another short tour in al-Andalus—between January 1348 and March 1350. At that time, in all these territories the plague pandemic known as the Black Death was raging and references to it punctuate this part of the work like a tired refrain. As numerous studies have shown borrowings and adaptations from other sources in the Riḥla, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa may not have made all the journeys he claims, but to date no one has questioned his journey through the Arabian area in those years. On the contrary, historians of the Black Death regard the Riḥla as an important document for the study of the scourge in the Middle East and North Africa.
 In this paper I aim to reconstruct the narrative of the pandemic in Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s Riḥla by taking from the text the passages in which it is mentioned, in order to answer some questions: to which places do these passages refer? What information does the Riḥla give about the disease, its effects and people’s reaction? Does it correspond to that provided by the Arab chronicles? Does it fit with current microbiology, genetics and palaeogenetics research? Since the Riḥla is a narrative work, how does it describe the scourge? Does its description differ from that of the chroniclers?
 The concluding paragraph seeks an answer to two more questions: does the Riḥla report Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s experience or might he and/or the editor of the work, Ibn Ǧuzayy, have taken information from other sources? And if Ibn Baṭṭūṭa did make this journey, thus probably being the only traveller who left an account of a “two-year journey under the arrows of the Black Death,” how could he return home unscathed?
Highlights
In this paper I aim to reconstruct the narrative of the Black Death in Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s Riḥla by taking from the text the seven passages in which the pandemic is mentioned, in order to answer a number of questions: to which places do these passages refer? What information does the Riḥla give about the disease, its effects and people’s reaction? Does it correspond to that provided by coeval and posterior Arab chronicles? Does it fit with the information provided by current microbiology, genetics and paleogenetics research? Since the Riḥla is not a chronicle but a narrative work, how do Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, who dictated the travelogue, and Ibn Ǧuzayy, who edited it, describe such a devastating scourge? Does his/their description differ from that of the chroniclers?
The concluding paragraph seeks an answer to two more questions: does the Riḥla report Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s eyewitness experience and information he gathered in the places he claims to have been or might he and/or Ibn Ǧuzayy have taken information from some other sources, without having been in those places? And if Ibn Baṭṭūṭa did make this journey, probably being the only traveller who left an account of a “two-year journey under the arrows of the Black Death,” how could he return home unscathed?
We cannot be certain that IB really followed the itinerary and made the stops he claims in this two-year journey “under the arrows of the Black Death.”
Summary
325-326 and IV: 179-211; GIBB I: 144 [EP 228-229] and GIBB and BECKINGHAM IV: 918-934 [EP 319-354]. The “plague” is already mentioned in Ancient Mediterranean sources such as the Bible,[13] Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex[14] and Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War,[15] but if the terms used in these texts (Hebrew deḇer, Greek λοιμός) are used later to indicate this specific disease, it seems that in the above-mentioned sources they indicated other epidemic diseases less deadly than the plague, such as measles, typhoid fever, cholera and smallpox.[16] In the Mediterranean area, the plague is attested in Egypt in 541 BCE in the port of Pelusium, an ancient city in the eastern Nile Delta, and we have molecular evidence that the disease was caused by a strain of the same Yersinia pestis bacillus that, several centuries later, would have caused the Black Death. 14 As is well known, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (dated 430/420 BCE) takes place in Thebes during a disastrous epidemic for which the author may have been inspired by the one that was raging in Athens at the time (see note below). 460-400 BCE), who was infected but survived, states that between one- and two-thirds of the population died Thucydides (c. 460-400 BCE), who was infected but survived, states that between one- and two-thirds of the population died (THUCYDIDES, Peloponnesian War, Book II, 136 [par. 48] and 139 [par. 53])
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